Shapeshifter vs. Basilisk II

[slaapliedje]

So I was thinking of diving in a bit to do some Mac OS emulation and knew about Shapeshifter from long ago.

But now looking at their official page, it says it has been obsoleted by Basilisk II.

Anyone have any insight into this?  I knew about Basilisk II from it being in Linux repositories, but they do have a copy of it on Aminet as well as on their home page.

Which one is actually better?  Or is Basilisk simply a rename and updated code?

I also find it rather odd, that Shapeshifter 3.11 was uploaded to Aminet in 2007, yet Basilisk II v0.9-1 was uploaded in 2003.  Arch Linux has a AUR package dated 22032005, and Debian Sid has 0.9.20070407-4.

Probably most will say stick to shapeshifter, I searched for Basilisk and there wasn't a single hit on these forums.

Opinions, experiences?

slaapliedje

[psxphill]

I also find it rather odd, that Shapeshifter 3.11 was uploaded to Aminet in 2007, yet Basilisk II v0.9-1 was uploaded in 2003. Arch Linux has a AUR package dated 22032005, and Debian Sid has 0.9.20070407-4.

Shapeshifter on aminet was from 2000, basilisk ii is from 2001 (this is according to the dates you get when you click view lha).
 
Baslisk ii was the follow on to Shapeshifter, had was probably abandoned due to legal issues or because the ripped off 68k code wasn't portable.
 
"About this time ShapeShifter was released. After Joe and I looked at it, we were pissed beyond belief. The majority of the code came from AMAX IV, with some of our code, and even Apple's code. I immediately starting documenting the code, and the changes that the code went through after several releases (especially after making it clear that much of the code was 'borrowed'). After going through the lawsuit in the UK, the owner did not want to attempt to go after 'some kid in Germany', because it would cost too much money, and we would get nothing back.
I sent two registered letters to the author, and each letter was returned undeliverable. I just wanted him to stop while he was ahead. Joe and I are probably the best 68K reverse engineerers in the world. We have gone through gigs of code over the last 4 years, figuring out why certain MAC applications do weird things with our MAC emulation. We can tell which Apple engineer wrote any part of the ROM or OS code, based on their programming style. We knew AMAX IV well too. It was easy to document what code came from where inside of ShapeShifter.
At this point I really can't do much about ShapeShifter, although there are a couple of legal councils in Germany willing to take 80% of the earnings of a successful lawsuit. Personally, I think that when judgement day rolls around, the author will wish that ShapeShifter was just a character in Archon..."

[Cammy]

Shapeshifter has a far more intuitive GUI, is easier to set up and use, and seems slightly faster on my systems. Basilisk II does have a couple of features that were missing from Shapeshifter, but it's still not really worth using except on a PC in Linux. I even prefer Shapeshifter to Fusion, which again has a worse GUI, is harder to set up, but has a couple of extra features missing from Shapeshifter.

With the amount of extra support and all the other people already using it who can give advice, it's definitely worth just using Shapeshifter, although give the other two a try and come to your own conclusions.

[amigadave]

@psxphill

Are you Jim Drew?

[matthey]

Basilisk II is by the same author as ShapeShifter. It was meant to be cross platform where ShapeShifter was Amiga only. The 68k version never worked very well and has plenty of bugs with few useful feature additions. It doesn't even fully work on my Amiga. Fusion is good and has some nice features but a few minor bugs too. ShapeShifter has the least bugs and most support. It's more polished than the other choices. Save yourself some time and take Cammy's advice.

[Pentad]

You know, I always wondered what happened to Simon Douglas?  I met him at an Amiga show long, long ago.  He was very nice and we talked a great deal about programming, the Mac, and other things.

Simon told me that he read the programmers of MagicSac(sp?) for the Atari ST (Mac emulator) stated that Mac emulation would be nearly impossible on given the memory mapping of the Amiga.  He thought that was crazy and started working on a Mac emulator himself.  He was able to get the thing booting by the end of a weekend (alpha version).

As I said, he was very nice and quite friendly.

Cheers!
-P

[desiv]

You know, I always wondered what happened to Simon Douglas?  I met him at an Amiga show long, long ago.  He was very nice and we talked a great deal about programming, the Mac, and other things.

I was amazed with A-Max..
Still am.  Love the one I have, even tho it's the older original model.
True story, the first computer virus I got was a 68k Mac virus I got on a downloaded (yes, pirated) game.
:-)

I haven't even really been too interested in the other Mac emulators.  A-Max rules.
(Although Emplant was an ambitious project, but I never really knew too much about it..)

desiv

[slaapliedje]

Thanks for all the advice.  Out of the two, I hadn't even been able to get Basilisk II to do more than give me a white screen and lock up.

In trying different configs of Shapeshifter, I managed at one point to get color, but now I can't seem to set the ram above 8MB, and it's giving me a black and white and extremely slow setup.

I have a Radeon 9250+Mediator in my A4000D and I haven't been able to get shapeshifter to use it without crashing.  I downloaded the CardTrickEVD and set it up to run in 1024x768 and it always gave me an out of memory error.

Seems to me everything is MUCH faster when running under the Radeon, so it'd be awesome if I could get Shapeshifter to work under it.  Really at this point, I am just looking to run a different browser under it.  But If I can't get it to actually work at a usable speed, that kind of makes it pointless.

It's odd, it has a memory option for ANY, Chip ram or 24Bit DMA Ram (I'm guessing that should be using the Radeon's memory) but that makes it lock up right when I click start.

Any suggestions?  I've tried reading through Cammy's excellent Howto, but still it's not exactly working like I want it to.  

slaapliedje

[psxphill]

@psxphill
 
Are you Jim Drew?

No, why?

[desantii]

I followed Cammy's directions and have Shapeshifter up and running, works great. Still need to optimize HDD speed through as I am still using a hard fiel vs dedicated disc

[matthey]

I have a Radeon 9250+Mediator in my A4000D and I haven't been able to get shapeshifter to use it without crashing.  I downloaded the CardTrickEVD and set it up to run in 1024x768 and it always gave me an out of memory error.

I haven't tried CardTrickEVD. I use MuEVD which requires a Mu library setup but works great. ThoR is a very good programmer.

It's odd, it has a memory option for ANY, Chip ram or 24Bit DMA Ram (I'm guessing that should be using the Radeon's memory) but that makes it lock up right when I click start.

No! Don't do that! This has nothing to do with gfx memory! Leave it on "Any" for the memory settings. This will allow you to use fast memory which is both MUCH faster and there is probably MUCH more of it.

[slaapliedje]

Yeah, been using it on ANY.  As I said, that's the only one it works on without turning the screen gray then sitting there.

Was painful, for some random reason my hard drive light wasn't working, must have been after I had bleached the front of my case (still need to do the rest of the keyboard) but that's fixed now, so at least I can see if the Miggy is just sitting there smokin' crack, or if it's trying to do something.

slaapliedje

[Reflex]

I used both Shapeshifter and Fusion on my Amiga 4000, and was able to install MacOS 8.1 too and make it work properly.
sadly, I still don't know why, from some time to today both Shapeshifter and Fusion don't boot with MacOS 8.1 anymore, the program stops during the boot of the virtual machine
I have a 060/66 mhz on my CSPPC board but this was even before
I wasn't able to make iFusion work too

[Flashlab]

The major advantage Fusion has over Shapeshifter IMHO is that you can change resolution and colour depth from within MacOS. So then you don't have to restart the emulation and applications that switch or offer different display options work better.